The Vine of Desire (8 page)

Then one day she is invited to sing at a feast at someone’s house and comes across the girl who was her prisonmate long ago, remember, the one who became a serving girl? She was
married to her employer’s son, and now she’s the mistress of this household, with a handsome son. The two friends laugh and weep as they speak of their fates—how easily their positions might have been reversed. And then the husband returns from his journey—and guess what! That’s right, he’s the nabab the singer loved. From his eyes she can see he’s still attracted to her.

Oh, these movies, Anju said when she saw this part. They’re full of the wildest coincidences.

But is the real world that different? Who knows how many lovers are separated by the wills of others, or circumstance, or their own misunderstanding of duty? How many lives are ruined by chance? It’s just that when it happens to you, you don’t tell anyone. There’s too much pain in it.

I didn’t say that to Anju, though. She might have asked, How do
you
know so much about it, Mr. Experience?

Besides, my years with my father had trained me to keep my thoughts to myself, and I couldn’t break that conditioning, no more than the kidnapped girls could break theirs.

(Even with you, I swallow down the things that crowd my mouth, begging to be heard. How tonight, serving spinach dal, your mother curved her fingers around the ladle. Her slim, bare wrist, at once strong and fragile. Her unpainted, glowing nails. I followed the silvery straightness of her arm up, up, until it disappeared into her blouse. Her elbow was dimpled and cool. A longing to touch it shook me so hard, I thought I wouldn’t be able to stop. I had to get up and leave the table. What’s wrong? Anju said. Your mother said nothing. I think she knew.)

What are we training you for, kid, without realizing it? What conditionings will stop you like those invisible electric fences suburban home-owners use to keep their dogs from running off?

The singer acts honorably. She leaves, the family stays intact, and her friend never knows that her husband had been the singer’s lover.

Do you think she did the right thing? I asked Anju afterward. What would you have done?

Anju made a face. I would have made sure I didn’t get into such a mess, she said.

After she went to bed, I turned on the computer. I was supposed to be testing a new software program. But instead I stared at the screen, thinking about questions of honor. How many unhappinesses they lead us into. Who can even say what honor is? Isn’t it right for us to pursue happiness? Isn’t that our first right?

I’d fallen into the same error as Anju, asking questions the movie never meant to answer.

The singer is back in her room, looking into a mirror, wiping dust from it. What does she see in her mirror-self? She half-turns, as though to tell us. But before she can speak, the movie ends.

I like that idea, don’t you? Scary and magical, all at once. A mirror-self to show me who I really am.

But if I find one, will I have the courage to look?

Sorry, kiddo. I got carried away with the story. I’ve kept you up too late. Sleep now. I’ll rub your back the way you like, little circles with my knuckles, as I walk up and down, carrying you on my chest.

Four

Waiting by the side of the road for the bus that is to take her to college, Anju clutches her book bag to her chest. She is dressed, as always, in blue jeans and a too-large sweatshirt, and though it is a cloudy day on the brink of spilling over into rain, she wears her dark glasses. She had gone into Wal-Mart with Sudha the day before classes began and bought the largest, most opaque pair she could find. Behind them, she feels anonymous, invisible, almost safe.

It is the year of death, the year of discovery. (Is it a rule that one must precede the other?) In Sarajevo, Johannesburg, Burundi, the ground is sludgy with blood. Christians and Muslims, Zulus and the ANC, Hutu and Tutsi. In Ethiopia scientists have unearthed the skull of humankind’s earliest ancestor. In the U.S. scientists are about to capture the elusive top quark, the missing link of the atom.

School started two weeks ago, but Anju still wakes with an ache in her stomach, a tightness like a watch spring that’s been wound too far. She wakes long before she needs to and lies in
bed, watching the first light apply itself to the walls. It is a delicate gray, with a rhythm to it like waves on a windless day, or her own breath. She closes her eyes to learn its nature. Inhalation, exhalation, the faint antiseptic odor of Listerine mouth-wash. She remembers a line she had read in childhood, she has forgotten where.
Every breath we take is another step toward our deaths.
When she opens her eyes, she sees that Sunil is watching her. He smiles and reaches over to kiss her cheek. His lips are smooth as waxed fruit. The light has grown hard, like diamonds. Each time this startles her as though it were something new.

On the bus, Anju chooses her seat carefully, counting off the rows until she is at the center of the vehicle. She prefers a seat with no other occupant. Aisles only. The window seat makes her dizzy, all that cityscape rushing past her: glassy office buildings which glint too brightly, freeways which arch their bron-tosaurian necks over each other. The strip malls hunker down in the middle of asphalt expanses, alien as stalled spaceships. From the corners of gas stations, signs shaped like eyeballs on stalks follow her with their unwinking stare.

There is a newspaper left on the seat next to her, sprawled open to a page that states that Steven Spielberg has won his first Oscars for
Schindler’s List.
Anju considers it for a moment, reading the words and the gaps between them. She has heard her classmates (but that word is too intimate) discussing the movie. Would her rescue of Sudha, minute in scale as it is, qualify as a Schindlerism? Or is it Sudha who is saving her?

She pulls a textbook out of her bag, smooths down the red and black cover. In one of her classes they are studying letters and diaries. The instructor, an enthusiastic young woman who makes Anju feel old and slow, clasps her hands together as she explains why these genres have historically been so popular
with women. She enunciates names.
Dorothy Wordsworth, Fanny Burney, Sarah Kemble Knight.
So much talent with nowhere to go except pages which only a single reader might see—or no one at all. The instructor thinks of it as a great pity.

Imagine all the letters that were lost
, she said last week.
All the diaries that were thrown away unread. What a waste.
Her voice was passionate, granuled with powdered glass. Sitting in the back of the class, Anju understood what she was saying. And yet—what freedom it must have been! What exquisite loneliness. Angling words across a sheet to reach one faraway mind. Blotting a page created only for yourself, as much truth as you dared to face.

The bus brakes. The doors whoosh open. Stumbling out behind the other students into air that smells exhausted, Anju decides she, too, will write a letter. She will write a letter to her dead father.

When the apartment door closes behind Anju, Sudha leans against it and shuts her eyes. Eight in the morning and she is tired already. The effort of staying out of Sunil’s way until he leaves for the office, the effort of getting Anju ready after that, in the little time that is left. Most days Anju won’t even get out of bed until Sudha pulls her from it. After her shower she will stand in the bathroom, a wet towel wrapped around her, until Sudha threatens to come in and dress her the way she does Dayita. She will push around cornflakes until they grow limp in her bowl. She will let the wet mop of her hair drip onto her shirt.

“Really, Anju,” Sudha says in an exasperated voice as she towels it dry, as she combs out Anju’s tangles. “The amount of fuss you make to go to college! It’s like you’re five years old. I
don’t know why you bother. You know I won’t let you miss class and stay home.”

“Yes, Mom!” says Anju as she picks up her backpack and dons her dark glasses. She tries a jokey smile, but abandons it in midformation. Nausea coils in her throat like smoke. Only when she focuses her thoughts on four o’clock does she feel better. She’ll rush home as soon as she’s done with classes, and Sudha will have a snack waiting, a khichuri made with rice and mung dal, a childhood favorite of them both, with a wedge of fresh lemon on the side. Afterward they’ll curl up on the bed and talk, with Dayita asleep between them, until it’s time for Anju to work on assignments and for Sudha to start dinner. No. Today they’ll walk to the mall instead and wander around. They do this often, pretending to be aimless and extravagant, just like the other shoppers. But they have a secret agenda. “Take notes,” Anju hisses at Sudha. “This is the heart of America.”

“Go, Anju,” says Sudha, giving her a not-ungentle push between the shoulder blades, and Anju goes.

Left alone, Sudha leans against the door, her eyes squeezed shut. She stands this way until Dayita crawls to her and tugs at her sari. Then she picks her up. Against her chest she whispers, “Oh Dayita, now we’re in America—but what shall we do now?”

Afternoon. Sunil finds he cannot concentrate on the report the secretary has typed up for him to review. The figures make no sense, and the words
—customer interface, product development, new virus alert—
have grown foreign, surreal. Gusts of talk and laughter flit over the cubicle wall and settle on his hair like ash. He runs his hand over the surface of his immaculately organized desk, but it gives him no pleasure. The message button on
his phone blinks redly at him like a Cyclop’s eye. There are consultants he must contact, programmers he must supervise, unhappy customers he must appease. His boss is waiting for an update on a project he is spearheading, an important project that could generate significant revenues and lead to a promotion, a move out of this cubicle into a real office with a solid oak door people would have to knock on if they wanted to talk to him. He turns to his computer and lays his fingers on the slight, concave coolness of the keys, familiar as a lover’s dimple. But his tie feels as if it’s tied too tight. He puts his hand to his throat to loosen it, then realizes he didn’t wear one this morning. He walks to the window and cranks it open. There’s a wind outside, a restless, rogue wind that slips in and shuffles through the report on his desk. Sheets rustle to the floor, but Sunil does not turn to look. He watches the gray sky as though for a sign. Is it at all like the sky under which he ran barefoot as a boy, yelling behind a cut-away kite? He must have done so. Don’t all boys? But it is hard to find a trace of it—that sky or that boyhood—in his face.

His face which he has schooled into pleasantness, so that the secretaries—especially the older ones, touching up their lipstick or patting their hair into place in the rest room—often say,
That nice Mr. Majumdar.
But today, alone in his cubicle, his face is as uncertain as a sky over which storm clouds are passing. Will there be a hurricane? His eyes flit like evening moths that sense a flame nearby.

He takes a deep breath, pulls that maverick wind into his lungs. He moves away from the window and checks his watch. Two
P.M.
Is he thinking that it’ll be at least a couple of hours before Anju gets back from school? Two dangerous hours that make his heart speed up when he thinks of what might be done
with them. There is a recklessness in the arc of his arm as he sweeps his coat from its rack. He leaves the floor littered with pages from the unread report and stops only to tell the secretary that he has to go home.